![]() Hawkeye initially claims the woman killed a chicken. A series of flashbacks replays the same actions with shifting details that get at the truth: a bottle of plasma used to treat a wounded soldier is first depicted as a bottle of booze to entice the soldier to join the party on the bus. The tragedy is initially presented in visual code. ![]() After Hawkeye desperately begged a woman on the bus to quiet her baby, she suffocated it. In a series of therapy sessions, Sidney smashes through Hawkeye’s layers of repression to discover what caused his breakdown: When he and his colleagues were taking a bus home from an R&R day at the beach, they picked up wounded soldiers and refugees to provide aid, but had to pull over and keep silent to avoid detection by nearby Chinese soldiers. The story opens with a shocker: Surgeon Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda, who also directed the episode), a motor-mouthed womanizer whose sharp wit and impetuous do-gooder tendencies inspired members of the 4077th to grin and bear it, is being treated in an Army mental-health facility by the camp’s psychiatrist, Dr. In subtly likening one character’s repression of unspeakable horrors to American commercial television’s decades-long commitment to sanitizing the ugly parts of life, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” showed that, to the very end, the people who made M*A*S*H were committed to expanding scripted television beyond the bounds of the network sitcom format. More importantly, though, it helped the series arrive at a powerful ending through one of the most formally adventurous subplots in its 255-episode run. ![]() The show’s “joking so you don’t crack up” ethos made this raw expression of emotion feel earned. Its two and a half hours are built around actors on the brink of tears, their bittersweet reaction to leaving the show fusing to the fiction of doctors, nurses, and staff at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital going home after the war’s end. It was because M*A*S*H signed off with one of the best television episodes ever produced in the United States - bold in form and content while confidently walking that high-wire of giving audiences catharsis without pandering to them.Įven if you’ve never watched an episode of M*A*S*H, its finale gives you the gist of what drives the characters and what they might have done (or who they might have been) before their final scene. Nor was it because 106 million people - nearly half the population of the United States at that time - tuned in, making it the most-watched single episode of a TV show in American history. Not just because it was an Emmy-winning, top-rated series that ran 11 years (almost four times longer than the real war) or because CBS sold 30-second commercial spots around the finale for what would be $1.2 million apiece today. When the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H aired its final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” 40 years ago this week, its impact was seismic. Photo: Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images (Pictured: Finale director and series writer, producer and star Alan Alda on set with co-star Gary Burghoff in an earlier season.) To the very end, the people who made M*A*S*H were committed to expanding scripted television beyond the bounds of the network sitcom format.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |